Adam Scriveyn and the Falsifiers of Dante's Inferno: A New Interpretation of Chaucer's Wordes

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy longe lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thou wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn¹

One word–Adam–has dominated criticism of Chaucer's witty, seven-line invective against scribal error and textual mistransmission. Early critics, assuming that a historical personage was intended, suggested a number of candidates who might be thought suitable.² More recently, some critics have explored the figurative implications of the name, arguing an analogy between Chaucer's erring scribe and the biblical Adam.³ A further trend has been to locate the poem within a tradition of complaints by artists against the transmitters of their work, an approach that generally finds little of specific importance in the name itself.⁴ Of course, Linne Mooney's apparent identification of Adam Pinckhurst as the scribe of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt MSS, announced at the 2004 New Chaucer Society Congress in Glasgow, has again focused attention on Adam Scriveyn.⁵ If the poem is indeed addressed to such a significant scribe, it takes on a startlingly new relevance within the canon of Chaucer's work. In the presentation of her findings, Mooney suggested that the poem's traditionally early date might be taken as evidence of a long working relationship between Chaucer and the most authoritative scribe of his works, which would suggest that Ellesmere and Hengwrt are significantly closer to Chaucer than previously thought.⁶ Regardless of how tantalizing the implications of this suggestion appear to be, I think we should not rush to conclude that the scribe addressed in Adam Scriveyn is identical with the foremost scribe of the Canterbury Tales. It seems premature to make such a claim until Mooney's identification has been explored more fully, and its considerable ramifications for Chaucer scholarship assessed.⁷

Nonetheless, it seems only fair to bring Chaucer's little poem into the spotlight since it has been so rarely the focus of critical attention, despite being universally familiar to scholars. The following account falls into two parts. The first considers previous critical approaches to the poem, especially in light of the possible identification of Adam. The second puts forward a reading based on a number of similarities with the description of the falsifiers in Dante's Inferno, an analogy that is perhaps more precise and suggestive than the oft-cited analogy with the biblical Adam.

I

The suggestion of an analogy between Adam Scriveyn and the biblical Adam was first made in 1975 by Russell A. Peck, though his brief comment is expressed in rather vague terms. In 1979, a far more convincing argument was advanced by R. E. Kaske, citing a popular antifeminist poem, usually called Versus de femina, which is found in "an extraordinary number of Continental manuscripts."⁸ It begins:

Arbore sub quadam dictavit clericus Adam,
Quomodo primus Adam peccavit in arbore quadam.

Beneath a certain tree, Adam the clerk wrote of how the first Adam sinned by means of a certain tree.

Kaske notes that if Chaucer intended a similar allusion in his poem, it would "rest ultimately on the parallel between the artist as creator and God as Creator," but that it "might be supported in a more general way by the great medieval commonplace of God as the author of the 'book' of the world or nature." He then proceeds to note a number of "[f]urther whimsical parallels" between the two figures, such as Adam's long lokkes, which may remind one of biblical representations of the Fall, a possible identification of the scalle with...